Month: January 2015

Portable Class Libraries allow the reuse of code cross-platform, following from the previous post, Morse Coder Part 1, we will be implementing a very basic Portable Class Library (PCL), again targeting Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.1.

Background

Portable Class Libraries provide a means of sharing code between Projects targeting different types at the Solution/Project level, they differ from Shared Code Projects in that Shared Projects share resources at compile time and compile as ‘part of’ their host project. You choose your Targets as part of the configuration of the Project, the result being a subset of libraries and namespaces being made available based on intersection of what’s available in the chosen Targets. We will be looking at Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.1, this could be extended at a later date to include a number of other platforms, such as Silverlight, Xamarin, etc.

This is the first in a series of blog posts detailing the process of creating a new Universal App targeting Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.1, from creation of the solution to publication to the store. The goal of the application is to translate between Morse Code and the standard Alphabet and vice-versa.

Background

MVVM Light is an excellent MVVM toolkit by Laurent Bugnion that I’ve used on a number of apps currently published on the Windows Phone Marketplace.
Universal Apps (can, and do by default) use a shared code project in order to share code between platform specific Projects at compile time.